When the devil comes knocking
on your front door, looking for a way to spread his evil inside, he won't
be sporting horns and a tail.

He's going to come dressed as your sweetest dream,
clean as a whistle, pious, sincere. He's going to speak your lingo, ape
your ways -- and when he opens up his little box of poison, it's going to
look like the heaven your mama sang about when she rocked you to sleep in
your cradle.

Then one day, when the mind-fog lifts, you see him
sitting at the head of the table, the walls of the room smeared with filth,
dead bodies swelling on the blood-mucked floor, the still-living victims
hog-tied and naked, screaming for mercy as the whipcords strike. He beckons
you forward with a welcoming smile. You pause for a moment. It seems so
strange: All this horror -- it would have once made you sick, but now it
just feels like ... home. You shrug, you grin, you take your place beside
him at the feast.

In just this way, while Americans were finishing their
Thanksgiving dinners and preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ,
a series of stories exposed -- once again -- the torture chamber at the
heart of their feast: a government gone insane, embracing terror, atrocity
and tyranny. Yet there was no public outcry against these desecrations.
Few even noticed; fewer still cared.

Last week, the minions of George W. Bush announced,
in open court, that he has the power to seize anyone on earth -- even "little
old ladies in Switzerland" -- and imprison them forever if he so chooses,
The New York Times reports. The minions said that anyone Bush declared "an
enemy combatant" -- even if they never took up arms against America,
even if they didn't know their actions were related to terrorism in any
way -- could be abducted from any nation, friend or foe, or in the Homeland
itself, and held indefinitely, "at the president's discretion,"
stripped of all rights under the U.S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions.

Assistant Attorney General Brian Boyle said Bush's
captives were entitled only to a single hearing, alone before a military
tribunal, without legal counsel or access to the evidence against them --
evidence which Boyle cheerfully admitted could be obtained by torture in
foreign countries, The Associated Press reports. Overturning centuries of
Anglo-American jurisprudence, Boyle said there were no restrictions whatsoever
on using torture evidence, as long as the president or his military agents
arbitrarily decide it is "credible."

Days earlier, The Sunday Times tracked down the "private"
planes of CIA front companies that Bush uses to carry victims of his lawless
abductions to torture chambers in Jordan, Egypt, Libya and Uzbekistan, where
"credible" evidence can be obtained with fists, cattle prods,
rape, drugs and starvation. For example, witnesses told of hooded American
agents grabbing captives in Sweden, stripping them, jamming drugs up their
rectums, putting them in diapers and chains, and bundling them off to Egypt's
hellhole prisons -- whose tortures have already produced generations of
violent extremists.

But outsourcing is only one aspect of Bush's Torture,
Incorporated; he has plenty of domestic production as well. Last week, the
Pentagon released a report -- completed long before the election -- confessing
that the "aberrations" of Abu Ghraib were in fact part of a broad
system of state terror spread throughout Iraq, the Washington Post reports.
Elite squads of "Special Operations" officers and CIA agents beat
and abused prisoners across the country, the Pentagon said, while regular
troops committed "technically illegal acts" by rounding up thousands
of innocent people at random and holding them for months in crowded prisons,
where they were often turned over to those same "elite" squads
for "special handling." Some of this blood-soaked "intelligence"
was "sent directly to the White House," interrogators noted. The
report also admitted that American forces had taken innocent people hostage
-- especially "female family members" -- in an effort to pressure
wanted men to surrender: a clear war crime, as if such things mattered anymore.

Meanwhile, the International Red Cross revealed that
Bush has even perverted the healing professions at his concentration camp
in Guantanamo Bay, using doctors and nurses to help "set the conditions
for interrogation" by withholding medical treatment and using their
diagnostic skills to determine captives' "vulnerabilities" to
various physical and psychological torments -- "a flagrant violation
of medical ethics," said the Red Cross. Its investigators also found
that the Guantanamo regime -- "an intentional system of cruel, unusual
and degrading treatment, and a form of torture" -- was growing worse
over time, Salon.com reports.

In such a moral sink, it was hardly even news that
more photos of prisoner abuse -- taken months before the Abu Ghraib atrocities
-- were uncovered last weekend, Reuters reports. This time it was "elite"
teams of Navy SEALs mugging for the cameras with bloodied captives -- some
with guns to their heads. Nor did anyone blink when Bush military brass
announced plans last week to create forced labor camps for all male citizens
in "liberated" Fallujah, the Boston Globe reports.

This Satan's Rout of blood and abandon comes directly
from the White House, where Bush's legal counsel, Al Gonzales, engineered
memos "justifying" torture and exalting unrestricted presidential
power, beyond the reach of any law, foreign or domestic. As a reward for
this violent outrage of American honor, Gonzales -- sweet-talking, pious
and sincere, just like his boss -- will soon become the chief law officer
of the land.

And the American people, what do they do about all
the horror being wrought in their name? They shrug. They grin. They sit
down to the feast.